Apple has rarely dipped into the mass markets before now when it came to computers, the Mac mini being the rare exception, which was just a little too nerdy (needing your left over keyboard, mouse, and monitor) to actually be a mass market product. Maybe the success of their mass market non-computer stuff has helped them dip a toe in the waters.

In any case, I'm happy they're trying it and having the right kinds of problems.

Branson, alas, appears in some of the photographs that are in the files. FWIW there's a rather infamous interview he did with Conan O'Brien where he got handsy with fellow guest Salma Hayek.

He's very good with the PR, but I'm not seeing evidence he's actually a good guy. He just hasn't dropped the ball on his PR to the same extent Musk did.

Buffet has said he thinks people in his position should be paying higher taxes than people who earn less. That's positive but in many ways just the bare minimum.

> The odds of Peter Thiel molesting a small girl are extremely low

If he molests boys, as alleged (he was in with Epstein too, that's the "joke"), that's somehow better?

If not, why did you make that comment? It's weird!

You're a little out of date. Java hasn't really been part of the web for... well, I believe the Java plugin was effectively removed from most browsers a decade ago, and wasn't used much after the early 2000s despite the initial hype.

The web is bloated these days, but Java has nothing to do with it.

Gonna be a problem if you want to run a modern web browser.

Which is frustrating because there's no reason a script-enabled rich text viewer with networking should require this much f---ing memory.

It's a mixture. Intel licensed their designs to AMD for a while so IBM could use AMD as a second source. Later they became competitors. There's no evidence of "reverse engineering", which isn't even a bad thing (reverse engineering is what you do if you want to create a 1:1 compatible version of a product without copying it - you basically create as best you can documentation of how something should work, and then use the documentation to create a design) or of stealing it. And why would they steal it and then reverse engineer it? Rather at some point when they stopped getting licenses AMD just... made their own version based on Intel's public specs. As have a number of companies, using various degrees of reverse engineering, including NEC, Chips and Technologies, Cyrix, VMT, VIA Technologies, and even IBM.

Furthermore, the chip in your PC right now, be it Intel's or AMD's, is mostly an AMD design, with some legacy Intel design crufted on. That's right, AMD, not Intel, came up with the 64-bit ABI that most of us have been using since the mid-2010s. And Intel licensed it from them. It's AMD's technology now.

Does that mean Intel are the good guys after all? No, this is corporate bullshit. Neither AMD nor Intel are inherently good or bad. Intel foisted some pretty awful CPU architectures on the world before coming up with a non-mediocre one in the form of the 80386 (cue the idiot I argued with the other day who'll claim the 8086 is a modern CPU and works the way modern CPUs do and does not have a ridiculous architecture - you're still wrong!) because they didn't know what they were doing after FF left to found Zilog, but had the market dominance, mostly through mindshare, to get their CPUs everywhere.

AMD were responsible for the bulk of the "runs a little hot" CPU wars in the late 1990s/early 2000s, where AMD pushed power sucking cooling-system-overworking CPUs to try to beat Intel's performance... but then Intel decided to ape them until the Core architecture, so Intel's not a good guy there either.

Both have made mistakes and tried to paper over them. Both have fired people who didn't deserve it. Both are, ultimately, sociopathic corporations.

Unlike Motorola. Which they still made CPUs. ;-) 68000 FTW!

> Maybe it's because AMD stock sits around $196 while Intel hovers near $41,

What? This is what passes for financial literacy these days? Do they think that the stock price of two equal companies is equal?

Maybe Berkshire Hathaway Inc, stock price $716,299.99 at the time of writing, can buy both of them, and use the money in the couch to buy Apple? I mean, if that's how the stock market works...

For those who really do think this is a thing, look up "Market Capitalization". That, divided by the number of shares, constitutes the share price, and is the market cap is considered the stock market valuation of a company. AMD does have a higher market cap at $355B to Intel's $253B, but those numbers are within 30% of each other, not nearly 5x.

There's at least some evidence on some level that the C-suite class actually believes all this bullshit. Hence the mandates forcing people to use AI and giving people bad performance reviews if they don't use it.

This isn't to say there hasn't also been a lot of redundancies blamed on AI that wouldn't have happened anyway, I've said as much myself, but certainly we've had plenty of cases where the C-suite have assumed that AI can fill in the gaps.

I think once the AI bubble pops, rehiring skilled workers will be a necessity for those companies that didn't bankrupt themselves.

Might very well be the opposite if all the non-AI companies betting on AI suddenly have to go on a hiring spree to rehire the people they thought they could replace with snake-oil.

It'd be nice to get back to Biden's full employment again.

Assuming the hype is real, I wonder if it's possible to train these algorithms on machine code, or if they need the semantics and expressiveness of a HLL.

Takes its sweet time because Congress keeps pulling the rug, you mean? And trust me, the people making the rug pulling decisions aren't "the present generation".

Wikipedia doesn't have an algorithm and it's not trying to make you angry or in any other way manipulate your mental state. It's a rabbit hole because knowledge is naturally a rabbit hole. People enjoy learning new things, despite the best efforts of the culture warriors to convince you otherwise.

Nothing about this lawsuit has anything to do with Wikipedia and you have to seriously misread it to think it does.

The quote from Alex Blechman also comes to mind:

Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale

Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus

/me sighs.

> Funny how that once-in-a-life-time switch to work from home, didn't stick, and all the corporate morons wanted to go back to the office, because they don't care about fuel and energy costs.

I think the theory that a lot of this was about forcing people out has some truth to it. They're psychopaths but it's, for some reason, easier on them if they don't have to make the decision about who gets made redundant and if they pretend the employee made the decision themselves.

There's also some truth that external investors, who had a lot of money tied up in commercial real estate, were demanding RTO policies.

The one thing I don't buy are the excuses they gave. For the most part, WFH resulted in substantial productivity gains for the businesses that implemented it properly. It's unfortunate but the reality is that most businesses do not seem to prioritize the needs of the business over the need to stay in line with what they think people want to hear.

Once again, Jack Tramiel gets no credit despite pushing computers into more hands than anyone else...

(Yes, not an engineer, but neither was Jobs. Jobs was always management and marketing, whatever his background might have been.)

I think the reality is that multiple people turned a hobby into a market and phenomenon. The reason Jobs gets so much focus is, I'm guessing:

1. While like Tramiel, Sinclair, Chris Curry/Hermann Hauser, and the largely forgotten names behind the TRS-80, he pushed for home computers to go to a wider audience than just electrical engineers, he charged more and aimed at the upper middle classes, from where our decision makers and journalists come from.

2. He was one of the few people with power to recognize the importance of the GUI work Xerox was doing and had Apple invest in that and produce the first computer aimed at the audience I just mentioned that had a WIMP interface.

3. He didn't leave.
  - Sinclair quit computing after the Z88.
  - Tramiel was fired from Commodore for dumb stupid reasons, was up against heavy competition from his old employer at Atari, and eventually wound down the latter not seeing it as having a future (and, to be honest, being at retirement age anyway.) As a result most Millennials and younger people have never heard of him. (If you're reading this and haven't, go read about him, he's a fascinating person. Engineers loved him. Marketers admired him. And people in business with him - dealerships, suppliers, etc - hated him...)
- The Acorn people faded out of view being kicked around upper management at Olivetti and then founding other interesting companies which, alas, was at a time the entire computing establishment had decided that only IBM PC clones mattered. Their relevance disappeared.
- Anyone know the TRS-80 people? Regardless, Radio Shack was more a traditional corporation anyway, if there was a Mr/Ms TRS-80, they didn't have much influence once Radio Shack hitched to the IBM PC clone thing.

So that left Jobs who came back to a still-active still-not-bankrupt still-selling-non-PCs Apple. And that gave him a far bigger boost in the public eye than those who had effectively left the industry because their companies could no longer operate doing anything interesting in the IBM PC clone world.

Jobs was not as big a figure pre-comeback. I knew of him, I remember reading the reports of him being fired from Apple in Personal Computer World, but these were inside baseball type stories. He was no bigger in that story than the person who fired him, John Sculley. The fact Jobs was the founder of NeXT was mentioned, but it was very much "Former Apple executive create impressive workstation". The articles would inevitably explain who Jobs was and why he was fired from Apple.

Over time, his rep grew. But don't discount that it wasn't during his first stint as major Apple executive.